Two sided time,
Your rebirth can’t hurt,
Branch out behind, the pain.

~ “Closure” by Chevelle

I look over my life and see that every enormous, drastic, heart-rending change that has occurred in my life pushes me closer and closer to the type of person I want to be. I see in this progression not a breakdown of myself but a breakdown of what is unnecessary within me. I am not there yet but I can see how this will continue and, with every new shift, every new rift in my existence, will only propel me with greater clarity and understanding towards the type of life I want to live, the way I want to be, and the way I want to situation myself in the world.

So it goes, and I am happy with it. Change is life. Stasis is death.

A friend of mine recently wrote some interesting and thought-provoking comments that I would like to address:

When I consider the history of humanity, I wonder about the feasibility of change. Powerful men have changed nations adn started wars, politicians have changed governments, priests have created new belief structures, but none of these things have truly changed people. None of it has really made people a whole lot happier or resulted in considerable and widespread self-actualization. Oppressive leaders have tried to force change on people, usually only making them worse or less happy; and on the other hand, philosophers and moral teachers have developed many systems and principles for living better lives, the vaste majority of which have been ignored by the majority of people.

This was written by an intelligent, historically and philosophically minded individual who sincerely wishes that he can make a difference. Yet the message is clear: how can anyone make changes to the world?  How, as one single individual, can anyone hope to inspire change?

This is not the first time I have heard this sentiment. Rather, this seems to be a common theme that comes up over and over again in conversation when I talk to people about everything from politics, to global warming and people starving in Africa. What can I, as one individual, do to help that?

The sentiment here, however, goes even further than that. It questions the fundamental ability of human-kind to direct their own fate. With all due respect to this friend, the statement that “none of it has really made people a whole lot happier or resulted in considerable and widespread self-actualization” is somewhat ludicrous. What I want to argue is that all of this talk of ineffectiveness and inability for us to make a difference is an illusion created by the way we live in modern times.

This is composed of a few elements:

1. Interconnectedness (the Global Community)
With the increase in exchange of ideas and cultures across the internet, television, and general migration, we get the impression now that we are moving towards one world-wide community.  For an idea to get to the top of the google search you have to compete again the millions and billions of other people around the world shouting out as loud as they can. The basic result is what I call a dilution of one’s power and opinion. Before, in a small community of a few thousand, one’s voice was one in a few thousand. Now it’s one in millions.  It’s a lot harder for an individual to get noticed in the middle of all that noise.  Too often you have to do something crazy to stir up controversy and get noticed.

Even if you argue against the feasibility and extent of a global community the same phenomenon exists within individual cultures as well. Anytime you are not dealing with smaller, local communities (I’d say, anything bigger than a city of a few million) your voice becomes so drowned out that it’s nigh impossible to feel like you have any effect at all, whether that’s in your vote for president or your influence over what TV show to keep on the air (thank God they saved Chuck!).

2. Distance
This may seem like a contradiction, since I just talked about how we were all one global community. But in reality is the world is still a big place and we are not all very close to one another. As a blogger one thing I have to keep in mind is that anyone, anywhere could read these posts and be miraculously changed (*hopes*) by them.  But I may not know it.  Even if they come and thank me for my infinite wisdom I will not see the way that it really changes their outlook.  Nor can I see if and how they passed those ideas along to others.  The world may seem small, but there is still distance and ideas still take time to really penetrate people’s worldview.

3. Magnitude
Are people happier today? Or rather, have we come a long way as a society? Granted, the whole premise of this blog is that we still have a frikin long way to go. But we have to readily admit, people at least have the potential to be happier today than ever before. That in itself has its own hosts of problems (more on that later) but, for the most part, human civilization has come quite a ways in a very short time.  To a large extent we’ve overcome the crude, dirty, and violent world that was the everyday experience  of all humankind only a few centuries ago. Although some places still hold on, we’ve largely overcome slavery, uneccessary and cruel violence between groups (I mean, the world is not like Apocolypto, which was part of everyday experience pre-modern era), and an enormous number of viscious diseases.  Slowly but surely we are learning to rid ourselves of discrimination, lift up the world’s poor, be more globally minded, and respect the environment.  All of this did not just happen: it was because of ideas that spread among people, ideas that start at and spread through individuals.

The problem is simple: it takes a long time for change to occur. Of course we have not yet reached “considerable and widespread self-actualization.” Of course we’re not all automatically happy. That kind of thing doesn’t come easy. As it is, we only regard a few people in history as truly achieving such trascendental status.  And we do listen and try to imitate those people. In fact, those people have had significant effects on humanity. Jesus, Moses, Mohammad, Ghandi, Bhudda, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, etc–these people have always served as examples that have improved people’s lives for centuries.  But even lesser individuals have helped bring about great change in their own small ways. You don’t have to be Ghandi to help a friend, to uplift a community, or to publish a brilliant idea. But you can’t expect things to change quickly. It takes more time than that.

Making a Difference

I would suggest that the problem here isn’t that one is ineffective, it is that too many people want to change the world too much.  They have good ideas and strong opinions about how the world should be, so they try to fight for that vision. But it isn’t any one persons world.  Your vision isn’t any more valid than mine.  You have your own things that make you happy and your own experiences and understanding about what leads towards self-actualization.  You can’t hope to force that vision on the world. They will never accept it, not in aggregate. Some people might like parts of it, fewer will like all of it. This goes with all philosophers and thinkers as well as the rest of us.

If you hold to this mindset then it will seem like you have no influence on the world at all, as if your one vote, your simple choices, your small voice, makes no difference at all.  Because of course your vote won’t automatically get what you want.  Of course your brilliant comment won’t instantly change everyone. Of course your system of philosophy won’t bring self-actualization and peace to the world’s populations.  People are too complex for that.  Yet that doesn’t mean your vote, your comment, or your life doesn’t matter.

On the contrary, it is easy to suggest that the most important things in life are done by individuals. Many of them go unnoticed. But together as human beings we  move this world forward. That is the hope. That is life.

Picture Credit: Gia Ciccone

This morning Patrick wrote a post about his unfortunate loss of memory and made an excellent connection to how a loss of a hard drive is very much like a loss of a part of your brain.  It would be disturbing to think of a part of your memory outside of your head if it wasn’t so advantageous–after all, it is incredibly easy to copy those files elsewhere, to edit them, and to add to them. But, unlike your brain, they are prone to randomly blowing up in your face. 

The phenomenon is actually incredibly common.  A few months ago I was reading Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau and came across a few pages on this very thing. He talks about a company called DriveSavers who offers a form of counseling as part of their data recovery service.  The employee he mentions has a degree in psychology and was a former suicide prevention counselor, who has the title “data crisi counselor.” Her whole job: help people cope with the loss of data. 

This is one of the radical new things that we’re encountering as our technology becomes an integral part of our lives.  We need counselors to handle all sorts of things that we never could have imagined before.  In fact, this is part of what allowed modern psychology to rise as a field–our increasingly busy, crazy lives are making us nuts.  We can’t seem to handle it. What other things are we going to need counseling for in the future?

Imgae courtesy of massthink